What’s your favorite chart of 2012?

December 20th, 2012, 10:45pm by Sam Wang

Nerds around the blogosphere seem to be collecting their favorite charts of the year. Obviously, I can’t pick my own. But to recall the Woody Allen joke…

…I can pick my second-favorite. Here it is (click to see the whole thing).

Randall Munroe (XKCD) departs from his usual hand-scrawled style to depict the political history of the United States in one very large chart. Waves of partisan and ideological realignment wash through the dominant parties. We’re in the Fifth (or Sixth) Partisan Age of the United States. Today’s right-leaning party, the Republican Party, is at an extreme of polarization. As is almost always the case, ideologically the left is a diverse mess. This demonstrates the eternal nature of Will Rogers’ joke: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

Or if you want a funnier XKCD, there is always this, which speaks to much of the pundit class in 2012.

22 Comments so far ↓

By far, my favorite chart of 2012 is the map of all states sized according to the number of their electoral college votes and colored by who won them. A work of political fine art. True nerds here will prefer something more complex, I’m sure.

(Needed — and dismal — is a map of the United States relating the minimum number of states by sufficient senators with filibuster rule to block any law, to the population of those states compared to the rest of the states. A visual version of “Jersey” votes for Senate action — my California senators are woefully deprived of the influence our population should give them. Wyoming on the other hand —–

I could probably come up with a whole top ten list from XKCD alone, but I’d go with Visual Field with the chart of the partisan makeup of Congress that you picked and Lakes and Oceans as close second choices.

No it doesn’t. Republicans think they can just go to OFA school and win next time. In reality, they have a whole different set of problems. Their old infrastructure was perfectly adequate to turn out their base, because of asymmetrical enthusiasm.
But you can’t turn out base voters that don’t exist.

Well…the theory is that gerrymandering makes the GOP incumbent immune to a challenge from the left….they can only be challenged from the right, by a more extreme right wing candidate ie tea party candidate. Thus the recent Plan B disaster.
Is this a validation of Chris Mooney’s Republican Brain hypothesis?

This is a good place to discuss the “look elsewhere effect”. In 2011, we saw a ~3 sigma bump, but we didn’t know a-priori where a bump would be, so we had to calculate the probability of a background fluctuation *anywhere* in the allowed spectrum.

The p-values reflect that.
This is called the “look elsewhere effect”.

That chart is obsolete; we now know that the sides are convex, at least in the recent past, and it’s pretty unlikely that they go inward at any point (let alone meet). Still a good format, but the content needs to be updated.